A Birds-Eye View of the Agenda: The Developing Countries and the Millennium Round

Developing countries have a considerable stake in supporting a comprehensive new round of multilateral trade negotiations within the World Trade Organization (WTO) in order to achieve further trade liberalization and benefit from intersectorial trade-off. For their constructive participation in the preparation of the agenda and in negotiation, however, the costs and benefits of the various issues must be carefully assessed. In the present paper, we attempt to analyze these issues starting from the traditional trade barriers to first and second generation new trade issues. In the latter case, international negotiation runs into more difficulties, since domestic policy choices and approaches are involved. The paper argues that the central challenge is how to reconcile further promotion of an open multilateral system featuring contestable markets with the needs of developing countries to follow independent strategies characterized by various forms of policy intervention.